Tag Archives: sightings

Black man playing with a magnifying glass

Pseudo-Events Clash

More than a half century ago, historian Daniel J. Boorstin — a Ph.D. dissertation-adviser of mine — taught us to distinguish between events and pseudo-events. The latter, he noted, were staged to get media attention whether anything event-ful had happened or not. On the border

People holding retro television next to each other

‘Duck Dynasty’ Phil Robertson’s Theology: Dead or Alive?

Since a recent GQ Magazine article outed his homophobic and pro-Jim-crow views, left-wing commentators have declared open season on Phil Robertson, the patriarch of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty.” Robertson, based on his reading of Christian scriptures, considers homosexuality a sin and predicts that homosexuals will be

Black man playing with a magnifying glass

Evangelical Pullback/Retreat

The public is getting used to headlines like these: “Evangelical Leader Preaches Pullback from Culture Wars” and “Southern Baptists Sounding Full-scale Retreat in Culture War?” The former is from The Wall Street Journal and the latter from Renew America. The theme has become a constant

St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow

Strange Bedfellows Scapegoat Russia’s Gays

It’s been a busy few months for anyone paying attention to issues affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Russia. This summer the Russian parliament passed a bill prohibiting the so-called “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations” in the presence of minors, a euphemistic

Black man praying

Black Churches Divided over Same-Sex Marriage

Recently, Sightings picked up on some lines written by the influential Evangelical-oriented author, Eric Metaxas. “Not so fast,” he wisely enough cautioned those who consider legalized, same-sex marriage to be inevitable. And yet, hours after he posted this alert, the United States Supreme Court issued

Black man playing with a magnifying glass

Evangelicals Change and Make Changes

The familiar “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” mantra no longer defines American religion. Politicians, bloggers, statisticians, and demographers now conventionally add “Evangelical” to the classifying. When Will Herberg wrote the canonical book Protestant-Catholic-Jew in the mid-fifties, Evangelicals appeared to be marginal at best. In recent decades they make the

Black man playing with a magnifying glass

Gay Marriage Tidewater

David Cole captures readers’ attention with the observation that “the gay rights movement has achieved more swiftly than any other individual rights movement in history, not merely the impossible but the unthinkable.” A few years ago, writes Cole, “those who fought for the right to

Black man playing with a magnifying glass

The Religious Right After the Election

Through the years Sightings has never commented on presidential campaigns, and the contest held this year is no exception. Today, self-liberated from the practice of opting-out, we can survey the comments on “public religion” in the campaign and election just past. We usually footnote these

Black man playing with a magnifying glass

Christian Bias? A Sociology Study on Gay Parents

Sightings, at least in its Monday column releases, regularly classifies many topics dubbed “church and state” as being unsolvable. We have quoted Walter Berns who wrote that the Founding Fathers, who get so regularly invoked in contemporary debates, solved the problem of church and state